The Era of the Trident Engine

Personally, I'd say it was mainly because we were tech geeks who, back then, actually believed in a web that should be accessible to as many different platforms as possible using as many different browsers as possible, not just Windows and IE users.

In a sense, that notion prevailed: the web is ubiquitous, browser lock-in is considered a douche move and you can still access some really worthwhile sites even with rather simple means.

In another sense, we all failed, lending our hands to help create the current privacy-invading, dark-patterned UX nightmare we're still trying to pass off as a reasonable way of making the world a better place.

I never thought I'd lament the day Microsoft stopped making their own browser core. As a web developer, one less rendering engine to GAF about is nice. As a netizen, the Google dominance is going from unsettling to scary.

just yesterday i ran into chrome's 2016 img/flex-basis bug which works properly in firefox but requires an extra wrapping div as a work-around in chrome.

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=625560

what possible motivation is there to fix it when you're not competing with anyone?

hopefully microsoft can help fix it now?

also yesterday, i was writing some ui tests that use getBoundingClientRect() at different media query breakpoints. not only does chrome intermittently fail to deliver consistent results between runs (even with judicious timeouts), at different screen pixel densities its rounding errors are several pixels off and accumulate to bork all tests in a major way. on the other hand, firefox behaves deterministically across test runs and there's a single pixel (non-accumulating) error in one of several hundred tests.

somehow, i made it through the dark ages of IE6 without permanent hair loss, but i dont have fond memories of those years in my career.

now manifest v3 is starting to roll out in Chrome 80. once uBlock Origin stops working, i will use chrome even less (i try only to use it for its devtools currently)

Sure, it's one fewer target to test against, but it saddens me to think that this is going to make it even more likely that web developers target Chrome and its ilk only and that the layout bugs in it are becoming the de-facto standard, just as happened with IE6 for ages. This is actually bad for Firefox even in the parts where it adheres to the standards when other browsers won't.

I feel like many people forget that, back when it completed against Netscape, IE really was the best browser on the market. The problem was that once they had “won” the browser war, Microsoft just completely abandoned development, allowing the product to languish and become the terrible abomination many of us remember having to write ridiculous workarounds to support.

I am old enough to remember the time where VML and the others were invented. And at this time "Open Source" was still called by Microsoft a "cancer", and Linux users frightened for patent violation every 2 month by MS.

It would have been insane to re-implement or standardized anything coming from Microsoft at this time, leading you for sure in front of a judge for patent infringement...

Anything coming from Microsoft was radioactive due to stupid political decisions and aggressive patent & IP attitude.

This is sad, and cause us to loose 10 years in the web evolution, reinventing the wheel many many times.

Without even consider the millions of hours of engineering wasted to fight with broken HTML compatibilities, locked-in technologies (flash, Sliverlight, ActiveX, Vbscript) and continuously deprecated proprietary APIs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UGM-133_Trident_II

(Alas, I think they'll be around for a few decades more, unless someone is wicked enough to use them.)

"Internet Explorer already had many of the things that we came to reinvent later and that we now celebrate as innovations."

It happens all the time in tech, and IE probably reinvented some things from Hypercard or whatever came before it.

Treating them as advances that were, sadly, not adopted by the rest of the web takes a lot of chutzpah.

I had always wished MHT replaced PDF. But due to the rivalry at the time Firefox refuse to support MHT ( even to this day ). Webkit has WebArchive which as far as I know isn't support outside of Apple's ecosystem.

I dont actually buy the argument it was Vista that slows down IE development. IE 7 wasn't that much difference to IE 6. It shows Microsoft had very little incentive to improve the Web. I dont know how many actually hate them for not complying with ACID "Standards". I certainly dont. But at the time the Web has so many low hanging fruit a lot of people ( or just me ) were pissed Microsoft didn't even bother improving while holding the web standard hostage with its IE dominance. Along with the crap called Windows Vista.

Luckily we got the first iPhone, 2 (?) years later. And the rest is history.

Anything before 8 was a challenge due to some atrocious bugs.

This had it problems but it really taught you not to write sloppy CSS and JS as it would usually just wouldn't work.

Versions After 7 basically anything that wasn't in the spec supported wasn't implemented so you had to write code pretty much bang on the spec.

Just this Friday I solved a rendering problem with IE where SVG TEXT elements weren't being rendered correctly, I was calling element.innerHTML to set the text which was incorrect. I should have been element.textContent. Using element.innerHTML is incorrect as SVG elements shouldn't have a innerHTML property (they are not HTML). IE11 was actually working correctly, where the latest Chrome behaviour was incorrect.

So spending time making it work in IE has improved my code.

Should we address the elephant in the room? For us without a CS degree, Flash was easily the first choice, IE have lagging problems whenver there's more than three layers of <DIV>s around. Yes it has lots of cool capabilities but it's rendered largely impractical. Even Adobe Flex was about take over the "business app" world.

On the Microsoft side, .NET happened and Silverlight happened.

But ultimately, the iPhone happened. 1-charge per day battery phones happened.

BTW the article didn't mention <IMG DYNSRC> and background MIDI music support.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buzludzha_monument

The implementation of them seem to be totally inconsistant (sometimes weird nonstandard CSS syntax, weird meta tags, ".htc" files, etc. etc.), and very IE-specific, so it's almost impossible for other browsers to implement.

This is the real reason why they cranked out all these weird features: to vendor-lock people into IE.

Not sure if Playstation browser could do this either, but be nice since console's are more locked down but seems they are opening up since Fortnite I believe is the first cross platform game where your Playstation and Xbox friends can play together. Then I think if you created something like a virtual world where dynamic content is allowed, I think the console makers might not be too thrilled about that, so really like the idea of being able to publish console games as just a web app directly.

I also think Microsoft is more open too when it comes to consoles, for example you can go to Walmart and buy a Xbox and then turn it into a DevKit while I believe the others make you buy a expensive DevKit hardware that isn't the same as the console already shipped, but maybe this is because of Microsoft's PC background. So from my understand it's easier to publish to the Xbox if making a native game compared to the other consoles, can get started faster but still need approval to ship - while I think with the PlayStation you have to spend a lot of money just to license the tools before you even write that first line of code.

But, why did it fail?

Of course, as the article says, one reason was the Ballmer-era tsunami of bureaucratic confusion that inundated Microsoft and stymied the release of the Windows versions that carried IE.

Another was security. Cybercreeps love IE. Drive-by malware? IE. "Internet Exploder."

A third was the cost of compatibility. It necessary for web developers and later, web app developers, to develop and test once on all the browsers and then again on each version of IE. It didn't help that it came bundled with Windows: large-org IT managers often forced their users to use an atrocity like IE6 years after it upgraded. This bogus standardization shackled a ball and chain to third-party developers.

A fourth was, paradoxically, the whole ActiveX Control subsystem. Apartment threading, anyone? Monikers, anyone? It was just barely good enough that DICOM and other high-end imaging systems could use it. That took away incentives to get <canvas>-like stuff working well.

Other companies have done similar things. DECNet, GM's MAP/TOP. Apollo Token Ring. SysV vs. BSD. But none of those things hobbled an industry quite like IE.

Trebuchets are cool tech too. But imagine if every UPS truck had to carry one to place packages on peoples' doorsteps.

>The other reason could have been a lack of platforms to spread knowledge to the masses. The internet was still in its infancy, so there was no MDN ...

Really incredible demos, too. You can see the URL in some of the demos; looks like the author stood up a VM and wrote many of the demoes. (Recent Star Wars trailers in Windows XP?) Ah, later there's an Internet Archive link to a M$ published VM image!

> You think Internet Explorer could not animate stuff? Not entirely true. Because, back in the days there was already SMIL, the Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language. SMIL is a markup language to describe multimedia presentations, defining markup for timing, layout, animations, visual transitions, and media embedding. While Microsoft was heavily involved in the creation of this new W3C standard, they ultimately decided against implementing it in Internet Explorer.

This brings back bad memories; I recall being taught SMIL briefly in a web-dev class in college. I think Mozilla implemented it. IIRC, you could declaratively animate SVG via XML-like tags, rather than JS or CSS. I didn't know it could access DOM/HTML, or play audio/video!

The implementation of the currentScript() example uses `i` without declaring made me quickly panic. (Thank god JS doesn't allow that to work; had to double check in a console quickly though; "surely `undefined`++ won't convert anything to a number).

Invariably the cast in stone designs were PDF drawings from Photoshop where the art was in second guessing what the designer was thinking of and where they stole their influences from.

You could not implement a table in a cool way on MS IE and in a more boring way on the other browsers, knowledge was just not there or the space to experiment.

But I still use IE11, ironically, because I like to develop quick HTA tools for enterprise in HTML and Typescript powered by excel documents or access database using COM instead of having to download Electron and what not, which I don't need since I'm only developing for Windows.

it's unfortunate that everybody lost nearly 10 years because Microsoft stopped taking Webtechs seriously in order to focus on Silverlight and what not, which they later abandoned anyway.

I need to find an alternative to HTA though that still support COM since eventually Windows will stop supporting HTA apps.

Who still uses WMV?

Around 2012 when all 3 major browsers had similar market share [1] is what we want: everyone can make try extension but no one can ram them down our throats.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers

Well if you only look at the web and exclude the bulk of enterprise software in the 00’s.

> One part of why Microsoft's ideas didn't really catched on was that we developers just didn't get it. Most of us were amateurs and had no computer degree. Instead we were so busy learning about semantic markup and CSS that we totally missed the rest. And finally, I think too few people back then were fluent enough in JavaScript, let alone in architecting complex applications with JavaScript to appreciate things like HTML Components, Data Bindings or Default Behaviors. Not to speak of those weird XML sprinkles and VML. > > The other reason could have been a lack of platforms to spread knowledge to the masses. The internet was still in its infancy, so there was no MDN, no Smashing Magazine, no Codepen, no Hackernoon, no Dev.to and almost no personal blogs with articles on these things. Except Webmonkey.

People were building complex JavaScript apps back then (the term DHTML was coined in 1997), and there were plenty of experienced software developers and people interested in really learning how to code well. Similarly, there were many sites where you could learn techniques — not just A List Apart but many personal blogs and sites like Philip Greenspun's https://philip.greenspun.com/panda/ (1997). If you look at the first A List Apart entry in the Wayback Machine, they list many well-known resources:

http://web.archive.org/web/19991005040451fw_/http://www.alis...

(There is, however, a quite legitimate argument that back then English fluency was a very significant barrier)

The main problem was that 1990s Microsoft was all about “cutting off their air supply”. They threw huge amounts of money into building out tons of features, exclusive bundling agreements and promotions with various other companies, etc. but they were not nearly as lavish in spending on QA or developing web standards even before the collapse of Netscape lead them to pull most of the IE team away. If you tried to use most of the features listed, they often had performance issues, odd quirks and limitations, or even crashing bugs which made them hard to use in a production project and many of those bugs took years to be fixed or never were.

In many cases — XHR being perhaps the best example — going through the process of cleaning the spec up to the point where another browser would implement it might have lead to the modern era dawning a decade earlier with better than weekend-hackathon-grade quality implementation in IE. I look at that era of Microsoft as a tragedy of management where they had some very smart people but no strategy other than “prevent competition”.

While committees often make crazy decisions this is the other end of the spectrum. Similarly, orders from the office team for extensions.

The stories behind these things would even better reading.

You only have N bandwidth available to the house. Cable companies have a tradition in providing content; content can be very complex, and very rarely was content ever coming back from the house. So, instead of doing N/2 upload N/2 download, they did, lets say, N/4 upload 3N/4 download. Why haven't they fixed it? Legacy systems. We've all been there.

Using chromium as a base, browsers will have to differentiate by offering a better product.

“Better” is less likely to be better performance, compatibility, or accessibility.

By using much of the same code as another browser implementer, any browser vendor [hint hint] that still makes their own engine could reduce the resources they put on the foundations and web platform and put more of it on the product itself.

Perhaps we’ll have more groundbreaking innovations to move browsers forward. The last few big ones: multi-process architecture, tabs.

In effect, by using the same foundations, the browser wars could in fact be reignited and the users could be the winners.

On the web platform side, I.e., the stuff you see on MDN and w3c specs, using the same “base” doesn’t mean the browsers won’t have different implementations of future APIs if the vendors’ opinions diverge strongly. Case in point: Chromium used to use WebKit as its renderer and now uses blink, a fork of WebKit.